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Course for budding Business professionals

For the last two years, Technology Venture Creation (ELEC5701) has been offered exclusively to final year Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students. Due to popular request, this year we would like to open up enrolments to final year students in other engineering disciplines within the faculty. If you’ve ever thought about starting your own company- this class is for you!

About TVC

Technology Venture Creation aims to provide budding technology entrepreneurs with the tools and knowledge to take an idea and turn it into a world class technology company. Taught by experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Matt Barrie (Chief Executive of Freelancer.com and Inaugural BRW Entrepreneur of the Year), and Bill Bartee (Managing Partner at Southern Cross Venture Partners), this course will provide practical knowledge in evaluating business concepts, developing a business plan, forming a founding team, pitching your business, the fundraising process, protecting intellectual property, understanding financials, and developing a go-to-market strategy. The course will be heavily industry focused, and each week an experienced entrepreneur or financier will guest lecture a topic. The class will be divided into teams of four, with each member of the team assuming a role (Chief Executive, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Techology Officer). Over the period of the course, each team will turn an idea into a fundable technology business, by developing a business plan, a pitch and financials. Course evaluation will consist of a series of checkpoints, where the pitch and business plan will be reviewed as well as participation in class discussions. The final assessment for the course will consist of each team pitching their business to a panel of real world investors and entrepreneurs.

Technology Venture Creation will require intense dedication from each of the teams to evolve their concept into a business and prepare their business plans. Those that have a passion for starting a technology company will find the course extremely rewarding. Similar courses overseas, such as at Stanford, has seen the formation of companies such as Yahoo and Excite from plans presented in class. From the 1998 class of IE273 that the course lecturer Matt Barrie took, the class members went off to found companies including Paypal, Andale (acquired by Vendio), Like.com,Freelancer.com, Gigabeat (acquired by Napster). Graduates from that year alone have been responsible since for the creation of companies totalling over $2 billion in market capitalisation to date. We’re looking to recreate this experience here at the University of Sydney.

Real companies have already formed from TVC graduates; for example Leasate (TVC’10) secured financing from Internet Entrepreneur Simon Clausen to disrupt the real estate industry, Brainworth (TVC’10) just closed a grant from the Interactive Media Fund, and Minefold (TVC’11) recently graduated from the prestigious YCombinator program in California!

Finally, there is potential for a pool of seed funding up to $75k to be available to top graduates who qualify and wish to pursue their companies for real after the program completes. More to come on this as we sort out the details.

Class Mechanics

TVC is taught from 4-6pm on Friday at EE451. The first lecture each week will contain course material, presented by Matt Barrie or Bill Bartee, and help build a fundamental understanding of entrepreneurial ventures. The second lecture will be a guest lecturer from a selection of either successful technology companies or venture capital funds. In the previous year, this included guests from Atlassian, Spreets, BigCommerce, Tjoos, Omnisio, Threatmetrix, KTM Capital, Immune System Therapeutics, Uniloc, Uniseed, Xumii and Viocorp.

Class started first week! The first guest lecture was “Beginning the Journey” by Nikki Durkin, Chief Executive of 99dresses.com, who just graduated from YCombinator (YC W’12) and recently closed ~$1m in seed financing.

Enrolments are limited to 40 or so, so contact us today if interested!